Several people have asked me for my hardware recommendations for a new Linux gaming machine. I get rather frustrated by PC manufacturers who load computers up with expensive Intel CPUs and extra RAM you don't need, and then forget to include a graphics card. Or they proclaim PC gaming is not dead and proudly announce their "gaming machine" with a shoddy GPU, that costs more than my first car. I've been building my own PCs since high school, and I know you can build a PC with superior performance and lower prices than the garbage PC vendors are selling today. So I am writing this article to tell you what I would buy if I wanted to build a high-quality future-proof gaming PC with big performance on a small budget.

These components were chosen to give great performance at an affordable price, with maximum upgradability. I expect this computer would run any PC game today with maximum settings at 1920x1080 resolution. Components were chosen specifically for gaming, thus more importance is placed on the GPU and the CPU is relatively more lightweight. If you do not want to assemble the components yourself, any computer shop will do it for less than $100. I only chose components from reputable brands I have purchased hardware from before, no cheap brands or refurbished parts.

For Linux gaming, I recommend buying AMD CPUs. The integrated graphics chips in Intel CPUs may cause problems with detection of a discrete graphics card and make it very difficult to install graphics drivers. AMD CPUs also give a better price/performance ratio with somewhat slower single-threaded speeds at a much lower price. For gaming, the single-threaded CPU speed isn't actually that important since the intensive tasks like rendering and occlusion culling are typically offloaded onto the GPU, and modern game engines like Leadwerks make extensive use of multi-threading.

Disclaimer: I have not built a machine with these exact components. I am not responsible if it doesn't work, do so at your own risk, blah, blah, blah. Now on to the parts...

If you have any old computer, chances are you can reuse the hard drive, memory, optical drive, and even the case. Eliminating these items would bring the cost down to a ridiculously affordable $249.97.

I could have got the price down to about $350 if I used reallycheapparts, but I don't recommend doing this.

TigerDirect.com may have some prices even lower than NewEgg.com, but I find their pricing information to be confusing. I don't ever consider manufacturer rebates, since you have no guarantee you will ever actually receive a check.

Improving performance:

If you want better performance, invest in the graphics card. When shopping for graphics cards, just look at the number of "Cuda Cores". This will give you a pretty linear estimate of performance. (On ATI cards divide the number of "stream processors" by five and that is equivalent. But I don't recommend buying an ATI card for Linux gaming at this time.) My next choice up would be the Nvidia GEForce 670, which provides 1344 Cuda Cores versus the 650's 384, at a price of $299.99:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121707

Conclusion
The companies selling PCs don't seem to have a clue about gaming hardware requirements. Fortunately, you can build your own gaming rig and get better performance for much less money than anything they are selling. A good gaming PC doesn't need to be expensive. My recommended build here costs less than $430, and can be less than $250 if you have any spare parts lying around or an old computer you can cannibalize.

The upgradability of the PC means future upgrades can cost very little and add significant performance to your hardware. My suggestions for improving performance would raise the price by about $365, giving you a mid-high machine for $795. I don't recommend buying the very highest-end parts because the price/performance balance just isn't there, and a year from now whatever you bought will be second-best anyways.

When you're done building your killer Linux gaming machine, remember to take the money you didn't spend on Windows and use it to buy some great Linux games.

I'd say "adequate" rather than "killer". But if you are on a budget then this would probably do the trick for now and then upgrade parts later. The power supply is what worries me the most about this build with regard to safety (of your PC) and longevity rather than performance.

Coincidentally I was just building a pc for the first time in 2 years yesterday.

I last built my pc 3 years ago, and while the benchmarks are still relatively good by today standards support for the latest OpenGL drivers is no longer available and I'm stuck at v3

I'm also hesitant about the assumption that more cores means better performance. Not all games\applications take advantage of all cores, and you'll always have you main thread managing the rest. But at the same time, a lot of modern games are far more GPU intensive then they are CPU intensive.

You are suggesting 4 GB of ram? Is this a joke? 8 GB is currently a minimum. With next gen consoles behind the corner we already get 8 GB as a system requirement for a Watch Dogs game. More to come. And the time it takes for linux games to need those 8 gb is not that long.

The new consoles use integrated graphics, so their system memory is all they have. Discrete graphics cards have their own separate video memory. It is not my purpose to speculate on what hardware games that have not been developed yet might benefit from.

The new consoles use integrated graphics, so their system memory is all they have. Discrete graphics cards have their own separate video memory. It is not my purpose to speculate on what hardware games that have not been developed yet might benefit from.

Josh, please, stop confusing people. Consoles use discrete graphics. The only difference is that the graphics card share the same system memory. Integrated graphics are the one's integrated into CPU or motherboards like Intel HD Graphics. My reference to consoles was only there because the current gen consoles have small amount of ram and most games that came out had their textures compressed so much that you could get along with 4 GB of RAM. That generation is over now.
Second, Watch Dogs is already almost finished. It's in final testing currently, and those hardware requirements are for PC, not for consoles, so the 8GB requirement is real already.

Yes, they will (or might) be using a SoC solution, but both of them are based on discrete graphics card GPU's, just put together into 1 chip, which is clearly not the default integrated CPU APUs which, often, use the CPU universal processing power in addition to their own to compute graphics.

Valve just released some specifications of their "game-console". Looks like a competent hardware combination that too (still no price which I think will be a bit higher than the suggested hardware here).

The graphics card of their choice is NVidia too. Have not been using AMD cards for a while but had some expectations for the new APU chips but it looks like it will be some time before it is supported (and have good enough performance ?).